So here's my current plan for firing up these new technologies. As background, I gave a 15 minute presentation at a user group last night on the generalities of data abstraction and although I think I did ok, I also think that there are a lot more questions...
I've posted on a couple of forums for SharePoint development and haven't received a response yet. The bottom line appears to be that regardless of whether or not you have WSS or MOSS loaded onto your machine, you will not get project or item templates...